“It truly is mind-boggling,” Niemann said on his website. “You understand what people say when they’re humbled by something whenever you get to experience an event in your life that’s that special. So, I just want to say, thank you so much to country radio and, of course, all the fans out there for picking up the phone and calling in and just getting it up there. It’s just an unbelievable moment, and I’m forever thankful.”

But maybe just as mind boggling was the very first moment Niemann heard himself on the radio about four years ago.

It was back in 2010, after he’d released “Lover, Lover,”
his cover version of the 1992 Sonia Dada song “You Don’t Treat Me No Good.”

“I was in California, we were doing the radio tour,” Niemann told Radio.com.
“We were going all the way from San Diego to San Francisco within a couple days. We had just left Bakersfield. I was in a car with a friend of mine that worked at our record label at the time, and she was driving, and the gas light came on. We were looking for a gas station. All of a sudden, ‘Lover, Lover’ came on, and we got so excited, we cranked it up and we had the windows rolled down.

“It was one of those really surreal, cool moments, and then we just forgot about the gas completely. So we ran out of gas, and I had to walk a long way to a call box, and some guy showed up with five gallons of gas, and it cost $100. It was worth it, though, to hear the song for the first time.”